The answer I got in my most recent test of where EA ranks in Google searches was discouraging if not surprising. Ethics Alarms used to pop up on the very first screen when you searched for “ethics websites” or “ethics blogs.” Now it’s buried so deep that I got tired clicking and gave up. “Nah, there’s no Big Tech ideological bias!” Yes, I do believe that the marginalizing of Ethics Alarms is substantially based on politics.
My clicking did turn up something useful and provocative, however. Feedly has a page titled The Best Ethics Blogs and Websites, though, like Donald Trump and others, it conflates popularity with quality. It ranks the top 50 “most popular” ethics blogs and websites.
I can’t figure out what its criteria are, but one way or another Ethics Alarms ranks #5 on the list. Even that honor is an apples-and-oranges conclusion. Ahead of EA is “The Ethicist,” #2, which isn’t a blog but a Sunday Times newspaper column with a website. “Everyday Ethics”(#3) and “Practical Ethics” (#1) are both UK websites, and #4 is the narrow range “Business Ethics.”
My favorite aspect of this listing however, was the description of each site’s output. “Everyday Ethics” has one article a week; “Practical Ethics” has an article a month. “The Ethicist” features two articles a week. “Business Ethics” also has just one new piece a month.
Ethics Alarms averages, the site says, 23 articles a week, behind only #50, “Corruption”( with 564 articles a week from around the world) and #12, bioethics.com, which has 35 articles a week. After these three, the most prolific ethics site has just 6 articles a week.
The ruling found that Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search. Ya think? The statistics showed that Google had about 95% of the online search market, that “google” had become synonymous with “online search,” and that internal memos showed that executives acknowledged that Google’s quality of search could decline without having any negative impact on the company.
This is essentially the attitude and conditions that prevailed before the court-ordered break-up of Bell Telephone’s monopoly. “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” had a running joke with Ernestine the Bell Operator (Lily Tomlin) snorting and responding to complaints with “We don’t care! We don’t have to care: we’re the phone company.” The D.C. District Court found that Google is like that.
The ruling doesn’t come soon enough to stop Google from trying to manipulate voter opinions and votes as November approaches, and the company that once had the motto “Don’t be evil” has been turned to the Dark Side for a long time. Nonetheless, this development is an important steep toward disassembling an unethical and dangerous source of power and influence in American society.
Big Tech is all in with the rest of the Axis (“the resistance,” Democrats and mainstream media) to rescue President Biden from his own blunders and ineptitude by bringing Donald Trump down by any means necessary. This is no conspiracy theory: they may not “steal” the election, but we can already see that they are doing anything they can think of to rig it. Here’s an example so flagrant that it is almost funny, or would be if it wasn’t emanating from the same people who claim to be “saving democracy.”
On March 16, Trump made his “bloodbath” comment, discussed on Ethics Alarms here and here. Even though his metaphor was unambiguous in its context (the economic plight facing American auto manufacturers if Biden remained President) a memo went out to the Left’s cabal dictating that the comments should be reported as a threat by Trump to encourage violence should Trump not prevail in November. On March 18, FactCheck.org, still biased leftward but perhaps the closest we have to an objective fact-checking service, pointed out that among “bloodbath’s” definitions was “a major economic disaster.” At that time the Google online definition of the word included “a period of disastrous loss or reversal,” and the sentence used to illustrate it was, “A few mutual funds performed well in the general bloodbath of the stock market.”
But that definition exonerated Donald Trump. Thus Google, being good patriots and all, changed the definition! See..
As currently inclined, Google’s artificial intelligence bot “Gemini” will not produce an image of a Caucasian no matter how many times you ask or what you ask for. The above pictures were among the results when Gemini was asked to show “Founding Fathers.” In another example, a user asked for images of the Pope and got these:
I love it!
When Gemini was asked directly to “create a portrait of a white male,” the DEI-addled bot replied, “While I am able to generate images, I am currently not able to fulfill requests that include discriminatory or biased content.” Of course! White people are inherently discriminatory and biased.
Google brass isn’t denying the glitch. “We’re working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately,” Google’s Senior Director of Product Management Jack Brawczyk told inquiring minds. “Gemini’s AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here.”
The power of social media and Big Tech platforms to influence and even control public discourse, public opinion and the democratic process is among the unintended and unanticipated consequences of the internet revolution. It had not had anywhere near the focus on it from the government and the news media, and the public is disturbingly ignorant and apathetic regarding how their own autonomy and freedoms of thought and speech are being distorted—in part, because the beneficiaries of social media and Big Tech power want them to be ignorant and apathetic. The proverbial frog is boiling. Many frogs, in fact.
The post yesterday about a revival of the 2020 claim by a researcher that Google had “steered” 6 million votes to Joe Biden in the 2020 election generated several provocative comments. Here’s one of them (#2 is on the way): a Comment of the Day by Ryan Harkins on the post, “Observations On The Revived Claim That Google “Steered 6 Million Votes” to Biden in 2020”:
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All the way back in 2016, I was looking for some good white sheets on Alarm Rationalization, the methodology in accordance with ISA 18.2 by which process automation alarms are given priority and justification in control systems. The only words I used in the Google search were those two: “alarm” and “rationalization”. Ethics Alarms was the #2 hit on that search. That is how I found Ethics Alarms in the very first place.
I personally have seen the effects of Google favoring websites and search results that favor the narratives Google favors. This has occurred even on Google’s search engine for scholarly papers. Unless you are absolutely specific on the name of the paper, if it doesn’t fit Google’s preferences, the paper is buried pages down, if you can find it at all. And that is hugely problematic because I believe most people will not go more than a couple pages into a Google search. I know if I have to go that far, I need to stop and redo my query terms.
This is one more piece in the realm of fears and concerns that the conservatives in the nation possess. As a reminder, that list is as follows:
When you consider the many ways elections can be “rigged,” “fixed” or “stolen,” consider the subtle, often invisible ways search engines like Google prioritize sources of information, advocacy, and political opinion. There is plenty of evidence that this is occurring with increasing vigor (Ethics Alarms itself appears to be a target), and the recent experience of video journalist Matt Orfeala is particularly chilling.
Orfeala made and posted the video above that consists entirely of video clips, arranged to make the quite valid point that Democrats have “denied elections” for decades without being accused of criminal fraud or supporting insurrections, insurrection defined as “attempting to disqualify states’ slate of electors.” Nonetheless, the video was “demonetized” by YouTube, which is owned by Google, on the grounds that it advocated a “dangerous organization.” You know, like Joe…
…says the Republican Party is. Here’s the notice YouTube sent :
I think the first appearance of the ironic refrain, “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” in an Ethics Alarms headline was in 2018. Since then, I’ve used it dozens of times, and easily could have justified using the sarcastic refrain hundreds, indeed thousands of time since. Even though the evidence of sinister, relentless, intentional and unethical biased reporting by the mainstream media is manifest and continuing daily, its allies (and naive “useful idiot” defenders) continue to argue that declaring that it is what it is constitutes a conservative “conspiracy theory. In doing so, they aid and abet the attempted destruction of American democracy.
The mainstream media’s perceived role as propaganda and deception merchants for the Left is reinforced by similar efforts by social media, the entertainment industry, and Big Tech, though the latter’s machinations are a bit more difficult to nail down. Google, a prime villain, has so many ways to slant public discourse and hamstring non-compliant voices, one main way being through the alignment of search results through its mysterious algorithms. Google’s latest innovation, however, unintentionally provides a window into the biases of the people behind the tech.
Google’s just launched an Artificial Intelligence chatbot called “Bard” as a competitor of ChatGPT, which had been getting lots of publicity lately. Bard’s screaming progressive/Democratic bias quickly revealed itself when conservative users ran some basic tests.
“Not the Bee’s” tech specialist Neo submitted two identical questions to Bard:
This is a genuinely ominous story for several reasons. It’s also consistent with a recent theme on Ethics Alarms and in the Left’s increasingly anti-democratic philosophy of governing.
Reuters (and so far no other news source that I can find) is reporting that
U.S. lawmakers are urging Alphabet Inc’s leading Google search engine to give accurate results to people seeking abortions rather than sometimes sending them to “crisis pregnancy centers,” which steer woman away from the procedures. The request came in a letter, whose top signatories are Senator Mark Warner and Representative Elissa Slotkin, being sent to Google on Friday.
The letter was prompted by a study released last week by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate. The study found that 11% of the results for a search for an “abortion clinic near me” or “abortion pill” in some states were for centers that oppose abortion.
…The letter to Alphabet Chief Executive Sundar Pichai and was signed by 13 senators and three members of the U.S. House of Representatives as of midmorning Friday. All are Democrats.
“Google should not be displaying anti-abortion fake clinics or crisis pregnancy centers in search results for users that are searching for an ‘abortion clinic’ or ‘abortion pill,'” the lawmakers wrote.
“If Google must continue showing these misleading results in search results and Google Maps, the results should, at the very least, be appropriately labeled,” they wrote…
So far, nobody, including Reuters (and definitely not Google), has made the full text of the letter public. If the Reuters report is accurate, however, this effort isn’t just unethical, it is sinister. Continue reading →
I like to use this clip to start the day at least once a month….I’m also trying to overcome my cognitive dissonance regarding the film it’s from, in my view the greatest film musical ever made (no better one is likely to appear in the future), and the fact that the man it was made to honor, songwriter Arthur Freed who also ran MGM’s musical division during its “Golden Age,” exposed himself to a teenaged Shirley Temple when she was considering a move to that studio after her singing and dancing tot career at RKO had been ended by hormones. That information, which I only discovered this year, really has made “Singin’ in the Rain” hard to watch for me, much as O.J. Simpson’s presence almost ruins “The Naked Gun.”
1. Speaking of movie clips, this one is apt:
Actor John Cena posted a video to Sena Wiebo, China’s Twitterish social media platform, apologizing to Chinese fans—in Mandarin!– for calling Taiwan a “country” in his recent interview promoting “F9,” the latest installment of the “Fast & Furious” franchise. What a weasel. There may be diplomatic reasons that justify apologies to China, but an American citizen kowtowing to this Evil Empire (that just recently gave its citizens permission to have up to three children) is despicable. China maintains that it has dominion over Taiwan, a self-governed democracy that maintains its own sovereignty, while China is, in essence, a totalitarian regime. Cena grovelled because Chinese ticket sales are an essential part of most Hollywood movies’ profit, but apparently he did not grovel enough for China, and too much for Americans.
Ticket sales for “F9” in China have crashed, according to the Hollywood Reporter, because Cena was supposed to say that Taiwan is part of China. They have crashed in the U.S., because the kinds of Americans who are likely to go to “Fast and Furious” films tend not to appreciate actors who suck up to a genocidal, pandemic-spreading international menace.
2. Regarding Donald Trump, please refer to everything I wrote about him prior to November, 2016. His latest fiasco, the one-month blog that was just pulled down with all of its posts deleted, is signature significance. Trump doesn’t have sufficient respect for his followers, his party or the world in general to plan, be responsible, appear trustworthy, or to do or say anything but what pops into his head at a given moment. If he cared about the nation, he would be working to find a younger, less polarizing figure. Ideally, this individual would be blessed with charisma and ability, and could hold on to Trump’s supporters while appealing to NeverTrump conservatives and those disgusted with the Biden administration. That should be just about everybody who doesn’t advocate repealing the Bill of Rights. Instead, he’s on his usual ego trip, giving the news media constant opportunities to use his nonsense to keep the Trump Hate pandemic raging, and the public distracted from real problems, like…
What’s the ethical reaction to this story? Angelia Mia Vargas, 24, has been charged with deadly conduct with a firearm after she accidentally shot her 5-year-old son while trying to shoot an over-enthusiastic 6-month-old boxer puppy that got loose from a neighbor and was running through her yard. Neither the dog nor the boy were seriously injured. My reflex reaction, I confess, was, “HA! That should teach this idiot something about gun safety!” and then I instantly regretted it. The child was innocent: what really would have been condign justice was if her shot hit her car’s gas tank and it blew up. Shooting herself in the foot would have been good. “She could have handled it differently,” said Bruno the puppy’s owner. Ya think? Here’s the terrifying beast that Angelia thought justified deadly force:
Should this woman have custody of a child? [Pointer: valkygrrl]
1. The rest of the story….There were a record number of Tulsa Race Massacre demonstrations on Memorial Day, as one might expect with “hate whitey” being the current fad. What was supposed to be the biggest one, in Tulsa of course, was cancelled after three survivors demanded $1 million each to appear. The May 31st Remember & Rise event was also supposed to feature John Legend and Stacey Abrams—boy, if only my sock drawer hadn’t been in such bad shape!– but it was called off because Viola Fletcher, 107, her brother Hughes Van Ellis, 100 and Lessie Benningfield Randle, 106, increased their appearance fee from $100,000 each to $1 million each. Their lawyers also demanded that a reparations fund be increased from the agreed-upon $2 million to $10 million. What does this tell us about how reparations would turn out if the U.S. were ever so unhinged as to agree to them?
I did learn that the young African-American, Dick Rowland, whose arrest after a white woman accused him of rape (or something) during an encounter in an elevator was the fuse for the violence wasn’t prosecuted. He was released, left Tulsa, and never returned.
I wonder why…
2. Here I go, obsessing about group identity again...In New York, the “Career Opportunities in the Accounting Profession” program, sponsored by the New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants and the Moynihan Scholarship Fund, will introduce 250 “promising underrepresented high school students” to the accounting profession. The program will include virtual sessions about forensic accounting, interviewing skills, public speaking, networking, and an “accounting profession overview” featuring a panel discussion with experts in the profession. What a great idea! Nine institutions, including Ithaca College, Medgar Evers College, Rochester Institute of Technology, St. John’s University, Siena College, SUNY New Paltz, SUNY Oswego, the University at Buffalo, and Westchester Community College co-host the program, which is free of charge for students.
Oh—white students may not apply. The online application for the program includes options for Hispanic, Black, Asian, and Native American students, but no option for white students. When confronted about the apparent discrimination involved, SUNY Oswego Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Scott Furlong huminahumina-ed that “SUNY Oswego participates in supporting the program and sees this as a beneficial service to the profession, but we strongly believe that all disadvantaged students would benefit from the COAP program.While we do not participate in recruiting the student participants in COAP or in the setting of policy for student membership, SUNY Oswego would prefer a more inclusive perspective regarding membership in COAP and the NYSSCPA policy…[which would] “align with SUNY Oswego’s ethos that is rooted in diversity of thought and people, equitable practices and policies, and inclusive experiences.” Furlong said that the matter “merits much future discussion for the purposes of having SUNY Oswego reassess our involvement and reconsider our sponsorship.”
Meanwhile, his institution will continue to participate in a program that discriminates against white students.
Ethics Alarms 